“It feels somehow more than just a car brand now.”

Poster at London bus stop.

The cartoon and posters illustrated above, one from a Norwegian newspaper and the other from a London bus-stop, highlight just how poorly Musk is viewed by sections of the community.

So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?

It isn’t quite as simple as “touch grass,” but it also sort of is.

Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.

Here in New York City, in the week since the inauguration, I’ve seen large groups mobilize to defend migrants from anticipated ICE raids and provide warm food and winter clothes for the unhoused after the city closed shelters and abandoned people in sub-freezing temperatures. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago, where ICE reportedly arrested more than 100 people, and in other cities where ICE has planned or attempted raids, with volunteers assigned to keep watch over key locations where migrants are most vulnerable.

A few weeks earlier, residents created ad-hoc mutual aid distros in Los Angeles to provide food and essentials for those displaced by the wildfires. The coordinated efforts gave Angelenos a lifeline during the crisis, cutting through the false claims spreading on social media about looting and out-of-state fire trucks being stopped for “emissions testing.” Many mutual aid groups in Los Angeles have not just been helping people affected by the fires but have also focused on distributing information about how to learn about and resist ICE raids in Los Angeles. It is no surprise that some of the largest and most coordinated protests in the early days of Trump’s term have happened in Los Angeles, where thousands of anti-ICE protesters shut down the 101 highway and several streets in downtown Los Angeles Sunday.

Some of these efforts were coordinated online over Discord and secure messaging apps, but all of them arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers, some of whom have been organizing for decades.

Research conducted by the Mozilla Foundation indicates that the app referred to in the article, Clue, gathers extensive information and shares certain data with third parties for advertising, marketing, and research reasons.

Here are some menstruation tracking apps that are open-source and prioritize user privacy by keeping your data stored locally on your device:

• drip
• Mensinator
• Bluemoon

The company confirmed that code for docs will be open sourced “soon,” allowing for independent auditing and verification of its security claims.

i deleted the crossposts of this post from /c/privacy@lemmy.ml and /c/opensource@lemmy.ml (because protonmail is a faux-opensource snakeoil privacy product) and flagged the posts in other communities as spam.

I find your response discouraging, and your actions appear excessive. While Proton may not be flawless, it does offer superior privacy protection when compared to commonly used options like Google and Microsoft.

I volunteered my time and effort to craft the post, including citations, offering more background information, and incorporating reliable links to official resources. However, you made claims without substantiation, deleted the crossposts of my post from /c/privacy@lemmy.ml and /c/opensource@lemmy.ml, and flagged the posts in other communities as spam. Your decision seems to be unsupported by members of the four communities I had shared my post to.

It’s disheartening to see such actions taken without proper consideration, thereby causing harm to the privacy community at large. Avoiding hasty decisions that may stifle valuable contributions within the privacy community should be paramount. Consequently, I respectfully ask you to reconsider your initial reaction, abstaining from premature removals rooted in personal opinions devoid of solid backing.

By embracing a balanced stance that values both freedom of expression and responsible fact-checking, we contribute positively towards nurturing healthy debates and maintaining transparent communication channels. In light of this, I hope you will take the necessary steps to reinstate the removed posts, allowing for continued conversation on their merits.

Edit: You have now banned me from both of those communities.

Edit: You have deleted another post of mine from c/privacy@lemmy.ml that was titled “Chat Control May Finally Be Dead: European Court Rules That Weakening Encryption Is Illegal”, with your reason being that it is “snakeoil spam” even though the community members do not think so (the post has more than 750 upvotes)